I often see pasta as an easy out when it comes to meal time – cook some pasta, throw on some sauce from a jar, and you’re good to go. However, while it’s good for a lazy meal at home, the tomato-sauce-on-spaghetti trick doesn’t exactly impress dinner guests.
The Rebar Linguine recipe took a bit longer than canned sauce, but it’s a dish that you won’t hesitate to serve to company. The roasted vegetables, especially the fennel, really gave an earthy element to the dish, and the texture could easily be varied based on how finely the vegetables are chopped. Balsamic vinegar added a tangy finish to the dish.
Although our usual fare is dry pasta, we went with fresh spinach linguine for this recipe. This further enhanced the earthy taste and was definitely a good choice. Other types of flavoured pasta would put a different spin on things – next time we’ll be going with sun-dried tomato – but the assorted vegetables and generous amount of basil ensures that the Rebar Linguine would be excellent even with a relatively plain dried whole-wheat pasta.
Most of the Asian food that we cook ends up being a simple stir fry, but Rebar’s Pad Thai offers a chance to get a little fancier without adding too much complexity. Quick, easy, and open to substitutions, this is definitely a recipe we’ll be cooking again.
Like any good stir fry, this recipe lends itself well to mise en place. Lacking any fish sauce, we added a bit of Worcestershire to punch it up a bit – definitely not a traditional Thai sauce. Once we had all the ingredients chopped, blanched, roasted, and seared, we started the stir fry, and in about 10 minutes we were done. It was really that easy!
We used egg noodles instead of the suggested rice noodles, as our local grocery place only had the former (another blow to authenticity!). This dish could easily be made vegan by omitting the eggs (and replacing the fish sauce with soy or black bean sauce), but the eggs lent a wonderful texture to the dish and mellowed out the garlic and chile nicely. Even though we halved the recipe (which is supposed to serve 4-6), we got at least 4 reasonably sized portions out of it, and it’s a good thing – we’ll want more of this soon. This is the first time we’ve ever made this particular recipe, but it could easily become a regular in our weeknight repertoire.
When having friends over for a hearty meal, it’s hard to beat lasagna, and Rebar’s Lasagna Rio Grande takes it in a new direction. Smoky, cheesy, and a little bit spicy, this dish is probably my favourite lasagna recipe of all time.
The layers of this lasagna consist of cheese, cilantro pesto, smoky tomato sauce, roasted vegetables, and noodles. The cilantro pesto, which tested our blender (2 whole bunches of cilantro! Be sure to remove the stems, or you’ll end up with a stringy mess.) but tasted great, was both fresher and less oily than regular pesto and would make a great topping for other pasta dishes. The smoky tomato sauce, with red chile flakes, chili powder, and chipotle puree (a go-to Rebar ingredient) was simple to prepare, and would also make a great standalone pasta topping.
The vegetable layers were hearty, with several roasted red peppers, a few pounds of zucchini, and a couple bunches of chard. We added a bit of spinach to this, and ended up reserving some of the zucchini – it was the only way we could fit the lasagna into our pan! There is a lot of cheese in this recipe as well (something we didn’t hold back on), but it only works out to about a half-cup per serving. Not quite diet food, but really not bad for a lasagna.
There’s a fair amount of work in this recipe, but a lot can be done in advance. We prepared the cilantro pesto filling the night before. Everything else we made just before assembly, but in the future we’ll likely make the tomato sauce and roasted veggies a day ahead as well. There’s also a lot of room for variation here – adding more or less heat by experimenting with chiles, substituting different types of cheese, or throwing in an unexpected vegetable (squash would be great!) are all ways to make this recipe your own.
We served this lasagna with Rebar’s Southwest Caesar Salad, which will be covered in an upcoming Cook the Book post.